Question for College Gamers

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jointhedarkside

Limp Gawd
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These questions go to current college gamers. I'm wondering if you have time to game in college, as this is going to affect the laptop I am planning to buy. I'll be going to college for the major if Civil Engineering. Do you guys have time to game? If you do or do not have time, which major is it in? Do you have time, but choose not to? Why?

Thanks for your answers as this is very important to me. If I might have time, I am planning to get a Sager 5760, otherwise ill get an Asus S96j. I don't want this thread to be a debate on whether to get a s96j or a 5760 as I have been researching for nearly a year now, and I know my decisions. Thank you all.
 
I had time my freshman year. I even had time for a CoD CTF clan. But like I said that was Freshman year.

Now I am lucky if I can get in a few games of Halo 2 on live.
 
sorry being off-topic but i would go with the S96J. It will play games at max or medium settings and you can find a "decked" out one for 1500 $. The 5760 gets hot, and its big. You'll get tired walking around with a 17" laptop for 4 years
 
I got a degree in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech not long ago. The time I had for gaming came and went. The crunch periods got crazier and crazier as I progressed through college, so towards the end it felt like I'd have a month straight of crunch time, followed by a month of little or no work.

Ultimately, it depends on the classes you take, and the professors you end up with.
 
I gamed the whole time I was working on my Computer Science degree. If you really enjoy gaming, you'll find time...How much time will depend on what classes you've got, what kind of work load they're dumping on you, how serious you are about studying, how much you care about doing the college social stuff, etc., etc., etc.

I have less time for gaming now that I'm graduated and employed than I did when I was in school.
 
I am an Electrical Engineering Student at the University of Florida and during my freshman and sophomore years, I gamed hardcore. Last year (my Junior year) it bit me in the ass and I had to play less and study a LOT more. If you game hardcore, you will be fine your first year (as long as you arent an idiot) but if you keep it up your grades will steadily decline, as I found out. My roomate is a Civil Engineer and he plays World of Warcraft for about 3-5 hours daily, but he doesnt play 2 days before tests. He is also a Junior (I think last semester he was taking Thermodynamics, some CAD class, and a business related Civ-E class). Hopefully that will give you some insight.
 
depends on your major, being an engineering major you would most likely have a lot less time to game than say a communications major, mostly because you have a higher intensity major with more work in it...

but like someone above said, if you REALLY want to game, you'll find time...
 
I think you'll have plenty of time but you just have to balance it. Some days you'll be able to and some you won't. You'll just have to accept that. Also, I think it depends on what you play. I played an MMORPG during college and that definitely ate the time. You have to know when to stop and eat/sleep/go out/study/etc. I wouldn't advise staying up real late either. Perhaps put a cap on how late you are going to play. Nothing worse than gaming all evening and feeling like crap the next day.

And whatever you do, don't hit the bars and come home and game. In the mmorpg I was playing, I ended up butt naked in the middle of nowhere with most of my items missing including my armor. :D Good luck in school!
 
Well, there are really three roads you can take here, and I know people that have taken all three:

1. Play Final Fantasy XI so much that you fail out of school. Obviously this will interfere with your plans on actually finishing school and doing something with your life.

2. Study so much that your social life consists completely of talking with the janitor and bookshelvers at the library, but do fantastic in all your classes. This will interfere pretty terribly with your desire to play games or "make it" with individuals of the opposite gender.

3. Balance the two so that you get some game time in (and parties, let's not forget those) and still do fine in classes. This is the road I took and I'm happy with it.

I guess the point I'm trying to illustrate is that the amount of time you have will be up to you. No one in school needs to spend absolutely all their time in the library to do well, though there are a lot of people that do just that. You'll find time to play games if you want to. The weekends and evenings add up to a lot of free hours that you may fill with what you wish.
 
I recently graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry with a Biochemistry emphasis and an econ minor and I had quite a bit of time to game. I played a lot of the battlefield games as well as starcraft with my housemates. I chose to have fun, rather to spend all of my time studying. One other thing to think about is the school's network. I went to a private liberal arts school and the internet access sucked. I was pretty much limited to single player or lan games. Gaming turned out to be a good stress reliever and kept me from burning out. I have a feeling that Law school will be different though....

However, that was just me. I don't benefit alot from studying, the most important thing for me is not missing any classes and paying attention. YMMV.
 
I am a junior in Mechanical Engineering. My experiences are pretty much the same as other people. My gaming goes in spurts. I'll have a two week stretch with practically nothing to do compared to other weeks. I work full time in the summer and going back to school will actually be nice, so much more free time. Not sure if I actually game more during the school year, but you have a LOT more free time even if you are a good student (I like to consider myself one). Stay away from MMOs though...I don't consider that gaming, it's more like filling an addiction. I'm in a competitive CS 1.6 team and I consider that bordering on too much time commitment when we get to playoffs and such.
 
I strongly recommend you only play games which can be for casual players like CS:S, where you can play for a 30min and stop, or whatever its up to you. (ie NOT like a top end-game guild in a mmo like WoW where you HAVE to play a certain number of hours everyday raiding etc).
 
If you plan correctly, there is always time for everything. Its how you make it out to be. Or you can be really lucky like me, sleep 3-4 hours a night and never feel tired :) I love my body.

PS : Business / religious studies major
 
I will be attending The University of California Los Angeles during the fall. I have a little brother and my parents do not speak much english. I live about an hour away from the school, so I will be frequently visiting my parents and little brother hopefully every other weekend because I will need to help them read mail that the dont understand and lan with my little bro.

The current rig I am typing on is 5 years old, although I have upgraded a few components once in a long while. My family has never really had much money to spend on items except neccessities. I got a part time job for a year and have saved up around $2300 on my next laptop, my parents will provide the rest for a 5760 if i decide to get it .

I would not consider myself a hardcore gamer, as I mostly play games during weekends because the weekdays are hectic. Currently I have an Asus 6600 128mb and have been playing games at low mids - low settings. Thats why I really want the 5760 to play my older games like Doom3, Far Cry, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and CS:Source with max settings. Ive also purchased Hitman Blood money and have resisted openning it until I could install it on my new lappy. If I dont have enough time to game, then I might as well pick the Asus, which is still a good choice, but with less graphics power (x1600 256mb) than the 7900 gtx 512 mb card in the sager. I know one game I will definately get in the future, SC: Double Agent. Thanks for all your responses so far, I would appreciate any other responses from any other College students.
 
I'm currently pursuing a B.S. in Chemistry and B.S. Mathematics with premed concentration.

I gamed a decent amount my freshman year since I had no clue what I wanted to major in. My grades show for it unfortunately. Gaming pretty much died after Fall quarter of my sophomore year, which was when I figured out what I wanted to do in college. Now all I do is study study study and socialize with friends when I get the chance to. I play games once and a while but thats only with friends.

The rate of gaming time depleting varies depending on your concentration. I would expect junior year be the time where gaming time is very low if you have a respectable major and on a 4 year plan :p
 
I am a physics major and have a few friends who are engineering majors. (civil, mechanical, electric, computer) Anyways I had plenty of time to game my freshman year just because all of my classes were very easy. It was basically general ed. classes and "required" stuff. However now that I am finishing up my sophmore year I find that I have VERY little time for gaming. I know for a fact that as an engineering major (physics and engineering are similar in some aspects) you will be taking math classes that extend beyond calculus and some higher level engineering courses. I have pretty much given up gaming myself and decided just to hit the books.

That said, I look at it this way. This is college. You are not here just for the fun of it. How well you do now will affect you for the rest of your life. You might as well do the absolute best you can now. (Failing classes can really screw up your chances at any good engineering schools and at jobs later on.) Besides, after school you will have like 40 plus years to game anyways. :)

Do a good job. I don't really want to drive across a bridge and have it fall down under me because you flunked out of linear algebra or something. ;)
 
I got a BA in Biochemistry and Chemistry and I played games all the time. There were times that I had to make time to play, but you just have to manage your time. Gaming was and still is a great way for me to reduce stress/burn-out.

Some students went out and got drunk, I played lan games with people on campus. Whatever floats your boat.
 
I just graduated from high school last June, but I'm already taking classes for my B.A. in Linguistics this summer and I took two years of full-time college during high school through Washington State's running start program. I've found plenty of time to play games and still do things like post here on [H]ard|Forum as well and still maintain dean's list status every quarter. It's mostly about how efficiently you run your time as well as how much you like what you're doing. I've always found that to be key. As long as you take classes that you are fairly confident you will like (even try to do this for general university requirements), things will turn out good. I would have to spend much more time studying, for instance, Differential Equations than Japanese. Both are equally hard classes for different groups of people, however. I have friends that will be majoring in Electrical Engineering and they still play like 30 hours of Ragnarok Online each week, so it's not as bad as people may think.
 
when i'm in school, i have almost no time for games. the little free time i do have is spent with friends or biking. i like summer :)
 
I'd say another big factor is whether or not you will be working. You'd have to have a hell of a course load to never have a free second if there's nothing else on your plate, but a job will sop that up real quick.
 
I am an EE major and when classes are going full swing the amount of time I have to game is reduced drastically. Some semesters are better than others, but generally speaking I have to devote more time to school as the years drag on. It's not always just studying that eats up your free time. Homework (expect plenty in engineering) can drag on for many hours when you get some problems you just can't seem to solve for whatever reason. Sometimes assignments are just long, even if you know how to do the problems. Schedules are often less than ideal and you may have long days or days with lots of down time between classes where you don't have enough time to really do anything. For example, next semester my Weds. looks like 7:30 - 10:20, 12:30 - 1:20, 3:30 - 5:20. Some labs may require you to write formal lab reports with a lab group, which (in my experience) often will have to meet at night to accomodate everyone's schedule. Also, you're going to want to do stuff other than just school work and gaming. If you spend most of your free time gaming you're really diminishing your college experience.
 
I'm an EE and I find that there are slow weeks where there isn't much material and it is easily learned. Then there are crunch times like others have said.
 
Thanks a lot guys. You all have great advice. I don't beleive that I will be gaming all the time, as I swore of MMO's after playing Diablo 2 :) . Maybe I should go for the cheaper system, and wait until I graduate, find a job, and my financial independece stablizes. Then I can get a crazy system, with one of those DX10 cards and whatever super processors they have out then. 40 years to game :D , if im still interested and have time. Thank you everybody for your input
 
Namork said:
I got a degree in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech not long ago. The time I had for gaming came and went. The crunch periods got crazier and crazier as I progressed through college, so towards the end it felt like I'd have a month straight of crunch time, followed by a month of little or no work.

Ultimately, it depends on the classes you take, and the professors you end up with.
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w00t. I'm getting my CpE degree from there right now. :D

I would get a moble laptop. If you are really serious about gaming save it for the desktop. I was in your situation with wanting to game, so I got the fastest laptop I could and now it's a huge paperweight with poor battery life. It's a pain in the ass carrying around a 9 lb laptop to class and back and only getting 50 minutes of battery life on load. I ended up building a desktop rig for gaming just because the laptop was getting out of date even after only a year in. Now I have my desktop for gaming and don't need a super laptop so the hugeness and poor battery life and shoulder pains are a waste. I will never buy a "gaming" laptop ever again, moble ftw.

As far as time goes, it's all in how much of a social life you want to have :D I don't get a lot of free time (none when I have programming and design projects due), but when I do I usually play games. If you are the kind of guy who wants to go out and party in your spare time, you probably won't game much at all. You will have to convince yourself of how you are going to spend your freetime.
 
ThirtySixBelow said:
I would get a moble laptop. If you are really serious about gaming save it for the desktop. I was in your situation with wanting to game, so I got the fastest laptop I could and now it's a huge paperweight with poor battery life. It's a pain in the ass carrying around a 9 lb laptop to class and back and only getting 50 minutes of battery life on load.
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This is probably the best advice offered thus far in this thread. If you buy a laptop, buy it for maximum mobility and battery life. Buying a laptop to game on is an insane waste of money. They're expensive, heavy, get poor battery life, and some of 'em are nearly as big as a suitcase ;) . Get a mid-range mobile laptop and you can probably afford to build a decent gaming desktop machine for what you saved on not buying the gaming laptop.
 
make sure it has the minimum specs to run vista though ;P

i know some people who skip a little too much and I pity them cause they won't be able to run Vista when it comes (not well at least), and they are stuck with this laptop for the next 4-5 years too...
 
My Freshman Year of Electrical Engineering I had so much free tiem to game that my friends and I set up a permanent LAN in the dorm. We gamed almost every single night.
 
Mark305TBI said:
This is probably the best advice offered thus far in this thread. If you buy a laptop, buy it for maximum mobility and battery life. Buying a laptop to game on is an insane waste of money. They're expensive, heavy, get poor battery life, and some of 'em are nearly as big as a suitcase ;) . Get a mid-range mobile laptop and you can probably afford to build a decent gaming desktop machine for what you saved on not buying the gaming laptop.
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I agree totally.

I got my pc before enter college (it is in sig) because I knew it could perform better than any laptop at that price. Everyonce in a while i wish i had a laptop but i realize that if i need a computer while at school, i can always go to the computer lab or library. If i had to do it over, i would jsut forget about the gaming and buy a small light laptop with a long battery life, and save money for a desktop. U do not need a blazing fast laptop to surf the net, write papers, email, do research etc. So if i were you, i would buy the cheapest laptop that has a good battery life and was light and small (14" screen) and save your money and build yourself a pc while in school if you feel you have time to game.

I am getting a Biology BS and minoring in BioChem and I will be graduating a semester early, if that tells you about my class schedule (not super hard, but then again it is not a business degree :D ). I was able to play CS everynight i wanted to and go out on the weekends my freshman year and still maintain A's. But that changed my sophmore year and I had to buckle down, so gaming happenen less (but I also did other things than game when i had spare time). Then my junior year I had weeks were I could waste time doing fun things and there were weeks when I did not have a single break to waste.

So yeah, go with a cheap small light laptop and save money for a desktop if you feel like you have time to waste on gaming. Maybe while at school you will decide to waste your spare time doing something other than gaming (I know I did --- games aren't everything)

Damn that was a long ass post, maybe you will pull something useful out of all this. :D
 
The lappie I'm going to get is going to be Vista capable for sure. It is going to have a x1600 256mb, 1.83 ghz dual core intel. 2 gigs of 667mhz of ram. The thing is that both laptops have the same battery life. The Sager has about an hour and a half, 9 cell battery, and the Asus comes with only a 6 cell battery, lasts about an hour and a half too. But thats in full load, If the graphics card, processor, and screen brightness is lowered down to 40%, then it will last around 3 hours and 20 min. So I have no choice for battery life. I don't really want another type of laptop, as these are the two choices I have decided upon.

Im thinking of the Asus, it'll cost 1500$ with all the choices i want, Maybe 1300 if i lower the ram, hd, and such. The sager is a 2500$ monster! The Asus sounds good right now
Thx Everybody for all your responses so far
 
like many others here, i gamed my heart out freshman year. 5 hours a day at least. that, combined with pledging a fraternity, Army ROTC, partying like there was no tomorrow and hooking up with random girls really destroyed my grades. although i had to cut down on gaming, loose women (ok, i didnt cut down on that, but then again, who can?), and partying, i was still able to game quite a bit if i balanced everything out but it did get cut down to about 2 hours a day on weekdays and 3 or 4 hours a day on weekends.

i was a managerial economics/sociology major at UC Davis, so that might have made it easier than those of you here with EE CS, etc degrees. however i did find that i had a lot more time to game when i was in grad school, partially because classes were mostly at night and only 2 or 3 days a week at most. plus there was little or no homework and you could carry your laptop to class, which resulted in a lot of gaming while IN class. of course, i went to San Diego State for grad school, so it might have been easier than the other schools.
 
During the first weeks i had no time for gaming. I was trying to read ahead so i can slack off later. But I only played game after the first month I got to college. Month later met a few friends and havent game since. I got to partys, movies, dates, and etc. I hope to have more time for gaming this year. Im getting less classes hahaha. Im free at last! :D
 
everybody needs to game more... studying in college is overrated... id say probably 25% or less of what you learn in college will actually be useful... the froshmore years are a complete waste... and only 50% of what you learn in jr/sr years are gonna be applicable to whatever it is you end up doing... so... game as much as you can... once you start working... u wont have time to game and you'll definitely regret it... hehe...

just study the week or so before exams and you'll most likely do fine =D
 
Duel Major at Purdue, Mechanical Engineering and Physics.

Freshman year was one long gaming binge.
Sophomore year wasn't too hard to balance the load, but these last two years the work load increased substantially. I use gaming in the evening to encourage me to get homework done before I leave campus and come home. I keep weekends as free as possibly for fun, or atleast half of Sat and Sun if I have exams or projects. I just tried to keep from being miserable from heavy work loads.
 
jointhedarkside said:
Im thinking of the Asus, it'll cost 1500$ with all the choices i want, Maybe 1300 if i lower the ram, hd, and such. The sager is a 2500$ monster!
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If you're dead set on getting one of those two, definitely get the $1500 one. If it were me, I'd get something different...I can't stand gaming on a laptop.
 
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